Green is 27, old enough to be jaded, but he has the soul of a romantic poet.
All the Real Girls (2003)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:110
Fresh:78
Rotten:32
Average Rating:6.9/10
Consensus: Has enough honest moments to warrant a look.
Theatrical Release:Feb 14, 2003 Limited
Box Office: $141,311
Synopsis: ALL THE REAL GIRLS is set in a small mill town that gets smaller and more run down with each passing year. Paul (Paul Schneider) has lived here all his life, never been out of the county. It's... ALL THE REAL GIRLS is set in a small mill town that gets smaller and more run down with each passing year. Paul (Paul Schneider) has lived here all his life, never been out of the county. It's never really occurred to him. He lives a cozy, affectionate life with his mom, Elvira (Patricia Clarkson) and he works as a grease monkey for his uncle Leland (Benjamin Mouton). Charming in his way, he has a devoted circle of rowdy friends that he's known for ever -- Tip (Shea Whigham), the richest and most lawless of the bunch; Bo (Maurice Compte), a philosopher not interested in wasting his precious seed on the local girls; and Bust-Ass (Danny McBride), a goofball who is not the sharpest tool in the shed. It's a place of rednecks, mill hands, beer-slugging pontificators and fallen southern belles. Paul's life changes when he finds Tip's younger sister Noel, (Zooey Deschanel), who has just graduated from boarding school and returned to town. She catches the eye of Paul, who has never met anyone like her. And she's never met anyone quite like him -- funny and quirky and unpretentious. They fall in love -- a scary, uncomfortable love, with no precedents for either of them. Although he's had more than his share of romantic experiences, he has never felt anything like this. He's elated and terrified at the same time. And for Noel, this seems like the real thing, not that she knows what she's supposed to do next. For all her worldliness, and his previous conquests, they sometimes act like two kids playing at grown-up love. As the Winter progresses, things go very right, and sometimes wrong. -- © Sony Pictures Classics [More]
Starring: Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Shea Whigham
Starring: Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Shea Whigham, Danny McBride, Benjamin Mouton
Director: David Gordon Green
Director: David Gordon Green
Screenwriter: David Gordon Green
Story: Paul Schneider, David Gordon Green
Producer: Jean Doumanain, Lisa Muskat
Composer: David Wingo, Michael Linnen
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
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Reviews for All the Real Girls
A small movie about big emotions, with Green capturing the rush of love and sting of heartbreak with great vividness.
Wallows in high-fallutin’ indie-ness while catering to self-indulgent reality.
...now that I sit down to review the picture a couple weeks later, I barely remember it. Whatever positive impression it left sure didn't last.
Girls has small and simple charms, but the movie succumbs to the combined weight of its preoccupations with non-hurried, 'honest' interactions and general open-endedness.
A picture of fits and starts, sometimes touching and occasionally insightful, but overall quite artificial and affected.
Isn't likely to win over the romance audiences who look for fluffy distractions ... [but] will please those who like their relationship movies honest, realistic, and understated.
Green seems more in love with his perceived unconventionality than he does with his characters.
The film's strengths are overshadowed by Green's flawed script, which wobbles awkwardly between art-house eccentricity and trite Hollywood sentimentality.
Serves as an incisive commentary on the extent to which we, as the modern audience, have learned to accept a certain contrived cleverness as the true evocation of love.
Green's refusal to deliver a clear-cut denouement is less a tease or failure of imagination than a haunting truth about wounding love. He has bored deep into the American core and come up with gold.
Girls isn't fabulous, but you do feel its characters really have connected.
Too many scenes feel like actor's exercises in which characters assume unconventional positions and suffer bouts of spontaneous dancing.
Paul Schneider, a buoyant young newcomer from North Carolina, is the No. 1 reason to see David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls.
An incredibly real story about first love -- not just realistic, but real -- and a heart-breaking but unyielding portrait of what happens when that emotional purity inevitably falls apart.
An engaging and marvelously acted romantic drama that is unhurried and at peace with the incompleteness of our understandings of love and life.
Green ... makes messy poetry out of life's throwaway moments and all the things that other filmmakers might cut away from.
Latest News for All the Real Girls
July 19, 2007:
(Very) Early and (Very) Positive Reports on Apatow's New Stoner Action Comedy
Are you a big fan of the Judd Apatow posse yet? The guys who gave you "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up," and the upcoming "Superbad"? Well, good news. Some early reports... More...
December 19, 2005:
Beckinsale is Green's New "Angel"
Variety reports that the always lovely Kate Beckinsale will star in indie darling David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels," which begins shooting early next year. More...
| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
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| 83% 83% | Harry Potter and the H… |
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| 75% 75% | Julie & Julia |
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| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
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| 88% 88% | Inglourious Basterds |
| 78% 78% | The Hangover |
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| 47% 47% | The Girl From Monaco |
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